How to Describe Smells and Sounds in Writing, Not Just Sight

2026-10-01 · Yesterself

Read back a month of your own entries and count the sentences that are not about seeing. In most notebooks the number is close to zero. There will be weather, rooms, faces, what somebody was wearing, a screen. There will be almost nothing you heard, and nothing at all you smelled.

This is not because you stopped smelling things in March. It is a vocabulary problem, and vocabulary problems have solutions.

Sight is easy because the language already did the work

English hands you an enormous ready-made kit for describing appearance: crimson, oblong, matte, sallow, translucent, cluttered.

Now try to be equally precise about a smell. You get about a dozen abstract terms — musty, acrid, rancid, pungent, fragrant — and most are verdicts rather than descriptions. Everything else is borrowed from the source: lemony, smoky, fishy, like a hospital, like a wet dog.

The linguists Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult tested this against a language that works differently. Jahai, spoken in the Malay Peninsula, has dedicated abstract smell words the way English has dedicated color words. Asked to name odors, Jahai speakers did it about as consistently and briefly as they named colors. English speakers, given the same odors, hesitated, disagreed with one another, and mostly named the source they guessed at.

So reaching for the source instead of an adjective is not a failure of style. It is the only technique English offers, and once you stop apologizing for it you can do it on purpose.

Comparison is data; the adjective is a rating

"The kitchen smelled amazing" is a rating. It records the verdict you reached and nothing about what was in the air. "The kitchen smelled like the inside of a paper bakery bag" hands the thing itself back.

So the working rule for every non-visual sense: when you catch yourself writing an adjective, ask like what? and answer with an object.

• loud becomes like a chair dragged across a floor above you
• cold becomes cold enough that the metal door handle hurt to hold
• soft becomes the give of old bread
• horrible becomes like a swimming pool changing room

Two constraints keep this honest. Compare only to things you have actually met: a comparison borrowed from a novel is decoration, and returns nothing later. And prefer ordinary sources to impressive ones: a bakery bag, a bus in the rain, a school corridor. One good comparison also beats three adjectives, so this does not make entries longer.

Smell: the source, then the condition

The most reliable smell sentence has two parts: the source, then what has happened to it.

Wet wool. Cut grass a day after cutting. Coffee that sat on the hot plate too long. Sun on old vinyl. A radiator's first day of the year, burning off dust.

If you have a second line to spend, add one of these:

• The arrival. A smell is an event, not a property. "The smell got to the landing before he did."
• The enclosure. Smells live in stairwells, cars with the windows up, the cupboard under the stairs. Naming the enclosure makes the smell findable again.
• What it replaced. "The house smells of somebody else's cooking now." Change is more informative than the current state.
• Absence. Some of the best entries record that a place smelled of nothing at all — its own fact about hospitals, new-build flats, and rooms cleaned for a reason.

Most of what you call taste is smell, which is why food description collapses into adjectives so fast. Temperature and texture — too hot to hold, gone soft, still cold in the middle — get further than flavor words.

Sound: the object, then the interval

Onomatopoeia carries almost nothing. Bang, whoosh, clatter are labels for categories of noise, not descriptions of one. Name instead the object making the sound and what it is made of. "A noise outside" becomes "somebody's bin going over the gravel." "Loud restaurant" becomes "cutlery on plates, and the till printing."

Three moves worth practicing.

The near-to-far sweep. Sit still, shut your eyes, and write three sounds in order of distance: nearest, middle, farthest. It takes under a minute and always produces something specific: a fridge, a road, a plane. Somewhere unfamiliar it is the fastest way to fix an entry to a place.

The background you had stopped hearing. Every place you have lived has a hum. The flat with the motorway. The office with the failing fluorescent tube. The house where the boiler came on at five. You will not notice it again until you have moved out, and then you cannot get it back. Write down the hum while you are still inside it.

The interval. How long the pause was before he answered. Whether the knock came twice or three times. Timing carries more of a sound's meaning than volume does, and it is the part nobody writes down.

Voices belong here too, but as sound rather than content: the ending that rises on every sentence, the laugh that only happens on the out-breath, the way your mother says your name when other people are in the room.

This is part of the thinking behind how Yesterself works: each morning it delivers one letter drawn from your own past writing, and your evening reply becomes tomorrow's mail. Having your entries handed back teaches this faster than advice can: you find out which sentences still open and which have gone flat. The ones with a smell in them tend to still open. Yesterself is not released yet; there is a waiting list.

Texture, weight, and temperature

Temperature is the most neglected detail in personal writing and one of the most durable. Rooms are stored in the body as a temperature and a draft. Write what the day was like on your skin rather than the number the app gave you: the cold that only got you at the wrists, the bus too warm at the front.

Touch has better vocabulary than smell — gritty, tacky, slick, powdery, waxy — but the strongest entries record resistance: what a thing did when you pushed it. The back door that needed a shoulder. The bag heavier than it looked. A hand that did not grip back.

Include your own texture as well. Chapped knuckles, a sock seam in the wrong place, contact lenses gone dry by four in the afternoon. These belong to one season of your life and to no other.

Why the smell entry is the one that still works

There is a structural reason to spend your extra line on smell rather than on another visual detail.

Smell is the one sense whose signals reach the brain's memory and emotion structures without first being routed through the thalamus, the relay that handles sight and sound. That shortcut is the usual explanation offered for why an unexpected smell can return a whole scene before you have decided to remember anything. The psychologist Rachel Herz, who has spent her career on olfaction, has argued that odor-triggered memories tend to arrive more emotionally loaded than the same memories cued by words or pictures.

Proust's narrator gets the whole of Combray back from a madeleine dipped in tea, not from thinking hard about Combray. A thought you record is already an interpretation, and it ages into the opinion of somebody who knew less than you know now. A recorded smell interprets nothing. It is an index, and it stays usable.

A rotation you can keep

Do not try to write all five senses every night. That becomes a form, and forms get abandoned.

Add one non-visual line per entry instead, and let the day pick the sense. If nothing volunteers, rotate: smell on Mondays, sound on Tuesdays, touch on Wednesdays. Missing a night costs nothing — this is not a chain to keep unbroken.

Write the sensory line the same day where you can: smells, sounds and textures fade well before facts do, and a rough note tonight beats an elegant reconstruction next week. And if you are writing late anyway, record only what you can still honestly recall, and say so. Detail invented to sound vivid is worse than a short plain entry, because in five years you will have no way of telling the two apart.

Common questions

How do you describe a smell in writing?

Name the source and its condition instead of reaching for an adjective. Not "it smelled bad" but "it smelled like a fridge that had been switched off for a week." English has almost no abstract smell words, so borrowing the source is not a failure of style, it is how the language works.

Why is it so much harder to name smells than colors?

The linguists Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult compared English speakers with speakers of Jahai, a language of the Malay Peninsula that has dedicated abstract smell terms. The Jahai speakers named odors about as consistently and briefly as they named colors, while the English speakers were far less consistent and mostly fell back on naming the source. The gap is in the vocabulary, not the nose.

How do I describe a sound without writing loud or noisy?

Name the object making it, the material it is made of, and the timing. "A noise outside" becomes "somebody's bin going over gravel." Rhythm and the length of the silences usually carry more meaning than volume does.

Does sensory detail have to be written the same day?

Roughly, yes. Smells, sounds and textures fade before facts do, so a rough same-day line is worth more than a careful reconstruction a week later. If you are writing late, record only what you can still honestly recall and say so, rather than inventing detail that sounds vivid.

Do I need all five senses in every entry?

No. One non-visual line per entry is plenty, and rotating which sense you use keeps it from hardening into a form you fill in. A single specific smell will do more work in ten years than a paragraph of adjectives.